Banic, Earlene

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ORAL HISTORY OF EARLINE BANIC
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 31, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is October 31, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Mrs. Earline Banic, 607 West Vanderbilt Drive, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take her oral history about living in Oak Ridge. Earline, please state your full name, place of birth and date.
MRS. BANIC: Mary Earline Smith Banic, Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The date, your date of birth.
MRS. BANIC: September 3, 1924.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name?
MRS. BANIC: Doctor, D O C T O R, Doctor, his friends called him Doc, D O C, Dr. Earl Smith and he was born up in the country and had come to town to do what he knew best, blacksmithing and he had a blacksmith shop in Travelers Rest.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the date of his birth?
MRS. BANIC: July 29, 1892, in Gap Creek, South Carolina. He died, he died at 94, in Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s name.
MRS. BANIC: Mary Aileen, A I L E E N, Smith, Aileen Watson Smith.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You recall her place of birth.
MRS. BANIC: In Travelers Rest, South Carolina, April 19, 1903, and died November 4, 1980.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your father, what school history can you remember about your father?
MRS. BANIC: I really don’t know. My father was a very smart man to do what he was doing. He wrote very well, he was the treasurer for the Sunday School and so forth at my church and he took care of that very well and took care of his business very well, but I just don’t know about his education. I don’t know what grades he might have gone to because he was up in the way up in the country from there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your mother’s education?
MRS. BANIC: My mother went to school in Travelers Rest and she went to school as long as she could. Her father was the postmaster and she stayed home to take care of the telephone central system which was in their home and she did that until she married my father and therefore they never had phones there for many years afterward, because she got married and moved away and the central system was there and by the way; they took that and put it in a garage at our house and a few years ago they realized that that had absolutely rotted away and they were really sorry that they had not preserved that for posterity.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You have sisters and brothers?
MRS. BANIC: I have one brother. Carroll Watson Smith and he lives now 3 miles from our old home and that is now in the Greenwood County. He lives near Furman University. He is 81.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At South Carolina.
MRS. BANIC: Yes, and he has a degree from Clemson College. He has a master’s degree from North Carolina and he has a Ph.D. degree from Maryland University.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And did you say earlier your father was a blacksmith?
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother, did she work when she was married?
MRS. BANIC: My mother never worked until after she was married and went to work at the post office for the postmaster and she did that part time. She was paid by the postmaster himself because he wanted some more time off when it became time for them to have another assistant in the post office, and that was after the war started and my mother took the test and all the people coming home from the war were taking the test and you can imagine, my mother won and she continued in her job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now tell me about growing up did you grow up in Travelers Rest?
MRS. BANIC: Grew up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about your schooling in Travelers Rest.
MRS. BANIC: I had a very good school to attend. There was a brand new school from and it had the first grade through the 11th grade. It was all in the same building. The auditorium was in the middle and it was a very beautiful auditorium with an upstairs and we were segregated from the other end of the building and we had all teachers and I took anything that I really needed I guess to get along in this world and I had wonderful, wonderful teachers and they inspired me to, well I don’t think I needed any inspiration to go onto further things. I realize that because my family probably inspired me with all of that and I knew that somehow I would be able to go to college, and my mother that’s when she finally went to work in earnest at the post office when she was paid by the government to work there and so I knew that that’s why she was working in order to send me to college.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what type of dress code you wore when you went to school?
MRS. BANIC: Winthrop College was the South Carolina College for Women in Rock Hills, South Carolina, and there were 2,000 people at this college at that time. All were girls and all were wearing navy blue and white. We had very fine clothes to wear to all the big opportunities to hear wonderful people speak, any of the big things that were at the college we had to dress in our navy blue and white. We had just all white clothes. We had navy suits with blouses and so forth and we all looked very nice and we’re never in there in anything else when we were having big speakers and so forth at our school, but during the day and going to school and we went to school and we had buildings for all the classes. We ate there. That was different for me to be able to eat with 10 or 12 people at a table and to learn more people but we stayed together through a year’s time and we were allowed to go back and get more food if we needed it and they made the ice cream at the college. They had their own diary and they made great big things of ice cream and they cut them in big rounds and we had plenty of nice things for dessert.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you stay there full time in a dormitory?
MRS. BANIC: I stayed in a dorm there and when the war really came to a big head, we had a lot of aviation cadets there and I would wake up in the morning to singing cadets “around her neck, she wore a yellow ribbon, she wore in the spring time”, and all that sort of stuff. Any of the army songs and we heard them and they were already up and at ‘em and we were still snoozing away and I had to move from my dorm so that some of them could move into my dorm and I moved into a different one and they used a quadrangle that we had in the walkway and we can stand out and jeer at them if they had done something bad and had to walk that quadrangle where the mischievous stuff during the day; they were aviation cadets.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you date any while you were in college?
MRS. BANIC: I dated some, I dated one of these cadets and he brought down a car and we even used his car for a while as long as we could use some stamps in order to buy gasoline and I remember sitting in the board to get a new tire, his sister was coming to pick the car up and we had to go and sit in the ration board in order to get a new tire. We had very little money, my mother sent me about $2 a week and that was my spending money.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was your diploma in graduation from college, what did you major in college?
MRS. BANIC: I majored in home economics and that was the thing for girls, I really didn’t have much of a background, well I knew that I can, I needed to learn to cook and do all those things so I can get a job teaching with that easily in South Carolina and then I had a minor in chemistry so that is another thing that enabled me to look for work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you hear about Oak Ridge and how did you get here?
MRS. BANIC: A person from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, came to Winthrop College to talk to us about the opportunities here. I had been to Asheville, North Carolina, and I had been to Knoxville when I was very small, we had friends there and we came to visit them but I had never been out to Oak Ridge, but I hadn’t been that far away from home. We always had a couple of cars, maybe never a new one, but my father was so very handy that he would buy old wrecks and fix them up. I never had a license, but I did drive some around near where I live in South Carolina.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was the top job the man from Oak Ridge, offered you?
MRS. BANIC: A job as an analyst in Y-12.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you get from where you lived then to Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: I had a friend in Spartanburg and she was a music major and you know I visited with her and she had visited me and Spartanburg, South Carolina, is not too far from Greenville. Greenville is just next door and so we met in Hendersonville on the bus and we came to Oak Ridge on the bus. When we first came we had our clothes and everything and we rode the bus up here and we spent the night in Knoxville at the Farragut Hotel and we found our way to the bus terminal that was taking people to Oak Ridge and of course we had heard from them, you know, a little bit about how to get out here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year was that?
MRS. BANIC: I graduated from college in May and it was shortly after that time. In the meantime, my mother and I had been making me some navy blue things to wear along with the white blouses and so forth because Winthrop was a uniform school and everything should be those colors and so we had already fixed me a whole bunch of clothes to wear.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the year you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: 1945, right after we graduated from college.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you rode the bus from Knoxville to Oak Ridge, do you recall where you ended up in Oak Ridge, where you came?
MRS. BANIC: We rode the bus and I guess we came into the Clinton entry and…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Elza Gate.
MRS. BANIC: Elza Gate and from there we went to a place in Oak Ridge, which is still there by the way, it looks a little bit different and it was where a man just on the other side of Oak Ridge lives and he had a business there and that is where we went and stayed until we found transportation to where we were going to live and that is where we encountered people to talk to us about where we were going to live.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now that was outside…
MRS. BANIC: That was two miles from the Elza Gate but they did bring us into Mr. Tunnell building. Mr. Tunnell still owns that same building here in Oak Ridge and he is still alive and doing well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you stayed outside until you got word to come into Oak Ridge and then they brought you through the gate, do you recall them giving you a badge at that time?
MRS. BANIC: I am sure they gave us some sort of something because we had to have something to get in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you came to the building on the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike that’s known today is the Tunnell Building.
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Close to the Castle on the Hill and what transpired in that building?
MRS. BANIC: I just know that actually we moved into a dorm near there to begin with because it took some time for us to find out. They wanted to send us to another place but there was a, in fact, they did send us to a dorm which was near Jackson Square now at the time but we didn’t stay there but a very short time. There were people there. Here we were southern girls who had a regular time to go to bed sort of speak and most of the people there were away from home and carousing day and night and I said, “I can’t live here. I got to live with some other kind of people,” so they moved us into a teachers building that housed only Oak Ridge school teachers and that was all as you leave Jackson Square going away and it was down on the Turnpike actually but it was close to the building that we first went to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the dormitory that you first lived in can you just remember what the inside look like the room?
MRS. BANIC: It was very nice but I came with a girl that was much heavier than I and we had a bunk bed, and of course, I never slept in a bunk bed but I knew that I was going to have to sleep up on the top bunk and we got along real well together and it was different to say the least. It was not like being in a school dorm all those years and we never really live close together in a dorm but we knew each other because Spartanburg was not too far away from Travelers Rest, about 32 miles and so I would visit her and so forth and so I knew something about her.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now do you recall, did you have to go down the hall to the bathroom and shower was that in the room what do you recall?
MRS. BANIC: We had to go down the hall to shower and to the bathroom. I remember that much about those dorms. They were all wooden and they were very noisy, if the people wanted to be, and some people were working different hours and that was something that was hard to get accustom to but it didn’t bother us too bad until we sort of made up our mind. I think we did move into one other place for a little while and then we found out that there were houses where we might move. These houses were some of the largest house that they had built for people coming into Oak Ridge was a what they called they had A, B, C, and this was a D house and it was on Venus Road and we got there, they had had bunk beds in there but they had changed and put only six people into the building. She and I had a room together in one of those houses and there were other girls who were college people. We had to make our way as far as we had to make plans for our food and each of us took a week at a time and we cooked for a week, not each of us but two of us, we would cook a week at a time so there were three people, actually three pairs of people cooking.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you are telling me that in this D house which is a three bedroom house that was--
MRS. BANIC: No, I said a D house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: D had three bedrooms and there were six people living in the D house.
MRS. BANIC: Yeah. But no we had regular beds when I moved into there, regular beds.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bunk beds were in the dorm you slept in.
MRS. BANIC: Yes. I am trying to think about the bathrooms. You may know more about bathrooms than I do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well they had one and some had half baths as well but do you recall was the house warm in the winter time?
MRS. BANIC: Oh yes and the government, I don’t remember any, I don’t remember any bills for heat or anything, that was all in the rent we paid.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You remember what the rent was.
MRS. BANIC: Seem like that was in the beginning, it was seem like $15 a person. That seems such a small amount now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the people bringing the coal and put in the coal in the coal bin in the house?
MRS. BANIC: No, no. I don’t recall that at all. I don’t think it was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe where you washed your clothes and how you washed your clothes in those days?
MRS. BANIC: No, that is difficult. I imagine that we didn’t, surely we didn’t have a washing machine. No way would we have a washing machine so we had to wash them I guess and they had some large sinks in the utility room and I guess that we took turns washing them and hanging them up. That is so far removed from my thinking.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about grocery shopping?
MRS. BANIC: That was the fun part because we were so close to the street across the Turnpike. Venus Road is not too far from what is now the Oak Ridge Turnpike and we didn’t have to go very far to a store and pretty soon we had friends who had cars. She got a friend right across the street and whom she married. It was a boy that lived across the street and so he would come by in the morning and leave us his car for the day and go to work with somebody else and so if we were, we were all working shift work but if he knew we were off for the day shift, he would bring the car. We not only learned Oak Ridge, we learned all about Knoxville. We can go back and forth in Knoxville. I knew Knoxville like a book and we could get our groceries and do what we had to do. Often times we had to walk over there sometimes to get something we didn’t have and it wasn’t too far and buses then were traveling around through but that was they would go too far away so we didn’t shop for groceries in a bus. We managed somehow. Somebody would have some friend or something who would take us to get groceries, if we didn’t have a car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You talked about shift work when you worked. What shifts did you work?
MRS. BANIC: We worked all three shifts and that was an interesting thing because you had to learn to sleep in the daytime and you have nobody coming in and we were all different. Two of the girls that lived in my house, they worked way down past K-25 at some place way down in there and they were all, some of them were they worked for, oh mercy, don’t know, they worked for somebody but anyway they were almost engineers. They were really well. They were damn Yankees sort of speak and they had wonderful positions and we were happy to have them because they were entertaining but then we had, it was always somebody to take the joy out of living because she didn’t want chicken and she wouldn’t even be in the house if we cooked chicken and that girl is still alive and lives in Minneapolis now and I will never forget it and many of these people are gone. Many of my friends are gone and some of them would move away far away and we would almost never see them and I only know of three. One lives in Pennsylvania and one lives in Minneapolis and one and that’s about it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were also at Y-12 is that correct? What kind of job is that? Describe that job.
MRS. BANIC: I was put into a lab, a chemical laboratory in one of the buildings in Y-12. It was right down from the gate and there we met all kinds of people, which was so different from the people that we had known but we had nice bosses and they took care of us, so to speak, and then we had gentlemen friends in there, they were some of them were from far away and some of them, most of them were far away and so we got to know a whole new group of people. Of all those lives, there’s probably not very many of them around anymore but the boss man was a little bit older and he kept up with us pretty well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You recall what your job was you did when you were in a lab?
MRS. BANIC: Yes. There were interesting things to do. We were working in the uranium processing business and sort of keeping the people who were separating things from one thing from another and we had to put some things with them and shake up through a lot of funnels and then bleed them out whatever they wanted, it would come out. We would take them out and use that and we used a lot of, we had the dark room which we had to dry some of that out and, in a way it was interesting, but you never knew exactly what you were doing. Right then I did not know what we were doing but I knew it had to do with processing some stuff to find out its impurities and so forth and then I went from one place to another building when they built a bigger place and we did some of the same things. I worked in a spectrographic lab for a long time and so therefore we were doing, you know, a different type of processing the material so by then I had found out a little bit I knew we weren’t making fly swatters that’s for sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did anyone talk about-- ?
MRS. BANIC: That’s what we were always told.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did anyone talk about their job? Did you talk about it between yourselves?
MRS. BANIC: No, but I found out on a bus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you find out on the bus?
MRS. BANIC: Somebody told me. I don’t know who it was but somebody who shouldn’t have been talking told me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall seeing around the city billboards that would say keep your mouth shut?
MRS. BANIC: Oh yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Or (inaudible) you things of that nature.
MRS. BANIC: Oh yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Reminders that you shouldn’t talk about your work.
MRS. BANIC: That you are not to talk about it, that’s right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Also do you recall seeing billboards about the savings bonds and stamps and buying bonds?
MRS. BANIC: You know I really don’t remember an awful lot of that. You know we were still trying to get to the Oak Ridge Turnpike building and there was mud and there was this and that and the other when I first came and I was just glad to be able to get around and to go down to the tennis court dances and a few of those things for little bit of outing after we learned a little bit about the city and what was going on, but I don’t remember an awful a lot. I know there was some other grocery store people, you know people who were in different sections had their own places to shop. Lot of them didn’t go to this big farmer’s market that was up on the about where the Baptist Church and all is now. It was so different then and transportation for a lot of people was nil and they just had to get around as best they could and I remember that somebody lived near us and finally we had somebody to take us to work otherwise we had to ride a bus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The farmer’s market, you’re referring to the Baptist Church that’s first Baptist Church.
MRS. BANIC: First Baptist Church of course that’s a little ways from Venus Road but there were a lot of buildings on up through there and they sold different things, the different stores so you had to go to one store to get something and then another store to get another product.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you handle the mud it was so bad?
MRS. BANIC: I don’t know. It began to get better and we just had to clean our shoes and we had boardwalks to walk on and mostly boardwalks and then by the time we could get across the street when it was muddy there was some more, they put up few more boardwalks so people could walk on the boardwalk and they were just regular plank boardwalks that they put down and you had to stand in line in all the grocery stores where you went, if you wanted some meat you stood forever and ever and they only had meat certain days and you had to know when they were coming and never could you buy any ice cream or anything from anybody that didn’t have the, where-with-all to keep it for a long time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned ration stamps where you used to live, did you have ration stamps in Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: I must have because I had some friends at home who had farms and they had a lot of and they had gasoline ration stamps. In fact we used ration stamps when we were in college. I had some friends who would come and visit me and they had a car and they had tractors and they had other things at home and they would give me some of those stamps in order for us to use in the cars that we rode in with people.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you recall how the weather was, was the winters real cold and snowy?
MRS. BANIC: Well since I came in May it was very comfortable for a good while and I remembered night time it being real cold and riding on the bus with a heater in the middle of the bus and you would get there and maybe you didn’t have a dime to put in the and they passed out a few tokens and we dropped them in, they were just, that is their business, they had to keep the buses running and if we complained why they would let us use one of the tokens that they had.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were the buses crowded?
MRS. BANIC: At times, maybe not so much at night because I guess most of the people were just single people well probably a lot of other people I just don’t remember, I just remember getting on the buses at night and going in and I remember one time at Christmas time; the first Christmas I was working and I was, I saw that I wasn’t going to be able to go to South Carolina for Christmas. I had been there since May and I thought, “what am I going to do” and so I told them at work I would like to make my way to Knoxville so that I can get a bus to go home and I did just that, I was able to do that and I probably, I was very young so the world was my oyster and I figured that somebody was going to help me along and I did get to go to South Carolina for Christmas and they let me go at work and I asked the bosses if can be absent for a day or two and they said yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall were there a lot of men at Oak Ridge at that time?
MRS. BANIC: Well, yes, I guess, I remember going to church and the church I attended was up on top of the hill, it was up where the Jefferson Junior High School became and after maybe that was built we had been living in a dorm, we would walk up there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Chapel on the Hill?
MRS. BANIC: No, not the Chapel on the Hill, this is up above the football, the top of the hill, the football field is here now and there was a big building up there and I think that was a school building, that was Jefferson Junior High School back at that time; it was a junior high school, maybe it was the high school but, yes, it was the high school because I remember that Clinton came to play basketball there once but I wouldn’t go up there and we had come back to the rec. hall on the way back to our dorm when we lived down there. That was after but even before we moved to Venus Road I remember all that earlier, now that I remember.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You spoke about dances, where did they hold the dances?
MRS. BANIC: In the tennis court, in the summer time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Town Site area?
MRS. BANIC: In the Town Site area and down at Jefferson any place where, I remember so well that going to the tennis court dances.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well did they have a lot of men to dance with?
MRS. BANIC: They must have, we didn’t dance with each other.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what type of music they played?
MRS. BANIC: Well, I don’t remember any of the music from then but it was music that we had heard maybe at home or on the radio or something beforehand and when I was in college of course before that I knew a lot of the songs because we had dances every Saturday night. Sometimes we didn’t have anybody much to dance with but we only had to pay 10 cents to go to a movie and then we go onto wherever they were having the dance that night.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they charge for dances on the tennis court?
MRS. BANIC: You know I don’t recall. I don’t recall whether they did or not.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And was that live music or was it piped in music?
MRS. BANIC: I am sure it was piped in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Big band songs.
MRS. BANIC: They didn’t have any bands back then not around that I heard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tommy Dorsey and big bands like that.
MRS. BANIC: All yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What other things did you do for fun when you had the time to do those things?
MRS. BANIC: Well when the war broke out I have been asked many times where were you when everybody else was celebrating, we went to the swimming pool. We didn’t want to get into all the mess. There was a lot of young people here just loads of young people and I remember that we went to the swimming pool. It was fairly warm and we enjoyed that and we gave up all the other stuff just to be out of the way of people because people were so numerous.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about movies? Did you attend the movie theatre?
MRS. BANIC: Yes. There was one up where in the Jackson, one movie house in Jackson Square that I remember and later there was one in Grove Center.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Also did you go bowling or skating?
MRS. BANIC: Well we went over and watched. I was never a skater and I went over to later on went over to Jefferson and watched them skate once in a while and bowling in Grove Center maybe once in a while and by that time there was a lot of the big swimming pool was built. I don’t remember what year but --
MR. HUNNICUTT: You refer to the skating in Jefferson at the Jefferson shopping area is that on the west end of town?
MRS. BANIC: I don’t remember. I don’t remember any at Jefferson. It might have been but I don’t remember that. We were interested in going mainly to, they had some dances there at the Rec Hall and we would go in there and.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At Jefferson.
MRS. BANIC: Jefferson and that is a government building now like you are going up to the old Chapel on the Hill and it’s right on the, it was right on the corner.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was the library underneath the Rec Hall?
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s on Kentucky Avenue.
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the friends that you made in the neighborhood. Did you make many friends in the neighborhood when you lived on Venus Road?
MRS. BANIC: Well we lived among a lot of young people. There were quite a few boys next door to us and I do know one of those boys that is still alive and is here now and there was a house full of girls across the street and then a house full of boys just to the left of us and we knew our neighbors besides and we lived in that house on Venus Road for and I was the 13th one to get married out of that house. There were some of the girls that already married when I got into the house. They married right away before I got there in June of, in May of ‘45 and those people were interesting people because they were from all over the country and when we got a chance with friends we would go to Knoxville and go to dinner at some of the country clubs with some of our friends and that sort of thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you find they were from all different parts of the United States?
MRS. BANIC: Yes, yeah every place, every place and we did have a few of the girls got married and finally when the Chapel on the Hill was built and one of the girls in our house got married there and then another one and we helped with all the refreshments for the parties and so forth and that was interesting. I met my husband in 1946 and that was a different time for me because here I was a little Southern Baptist from South Carolina and I met a Catholic boy from Pennsylvania. The first boy in Oak Ridge, the first person in Oak Ridge that had a brand new car, he had his name on the list in Pennsylvania and this is the first car that came and it was supposed to be his sister’s car but she didn’t want a car that they sent which was a two tone green fleet line Chevrolet and when he brought a bunch of boys back to his house they had been out. They said how would you like to see a George’s new car, well, my eyes and ears pricked up because I had been riding to Knoxville on a big old bus with the big heater in the middle and having to change buses in Knoxville a couple of times to go where we wanted to eat and back to the movie and this, that and the other and now I had somebody that I could do this all in one car. What a big thing that was but then that was the problem of what is a little girl going to marry, how you are going to explain it to your parents that you met somebody you might marry. I said my mother will never accept him, but you know very a persuasive girl told her that you know this is it, you know accept me and him or not and so I remember when she was in her dying bed, she was hoping that George would come that day and help her because she was very ill and he could pick her up and move her around and my father was getting old at that time and he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t pick her up and I had to tug her around as best as I could and she loved George and even as a matter of fact when Christmas Eve would come he talked them all into going to midnight mass in Greenville once and I about fainted, but they all went.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s back up a minute to 1945 when the news came out they dropped the bomb Japan where were you?
MRS. BANIC: I was in the lab and that’s the first that I knew about it at all and it was very exciting time for us because by then we realized that we had been doing something for the war effort and maybe a lot of people didn’t really know, all of the people in the lab would work so hard to do what they asked us to do and the first thing I knew they allowed somebody to go out and get some coffee and donuts, so we celebrated. We celebrated the beginning of the war and never, never had we had anything to eat in the lab before, never and that was a fun time for us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What shift were you working when you heard the news?
MRS. BANIC: That was, I think that was the afternoon shift when we found out.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you left work and got back to the city was people still celebrating?
MRS. BANIC: I think so.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall, did you have a telephone when you lived in the D house?
MRS. BANIC: What was a telephone? I had a hard time getting a date with my friend because the man across the street asked me, he said “Earline, George said that he would like to take you out and would you go,” and I said, “Oh yes, I think so too,” and he said, “Well, he can’t come to see you”, and I worked shift and he worked straight days so it was quite a while. Finally he said he can’t get here when you are either working or whatever and it’s too late at night and you are already in bed. “Will you go if I take one of the girls in the house and you go with George.” I said, “Yeah, I guess that will be okay.” So I agreed to go with him for the first time then and as a matter of fact this person married the girl in my house and he is the one that used to come and leave his car with us every day to go shopping in Knoxville and he has just died here in town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall milk deliveries to the houses?
MRS. BANIC: Milk deliveries?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. BANIC: You know that I am sure that must have been but I don’t remember that at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about door to door salesmen?
MRS. BANIC: I never saw any.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about other place? Where did you live other than on Venus Road?
MRS. BANIC: Well by then I was married and I lived in a little apartment up on Waddell Circle and we had a car and I don’t think that that was really important and I rode to work with some people because George had to have the car to get there when he did and I walked down from my house down to catch a bus at, I can’t remember what the name of the street is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the apartment on Waddell Circle, any bedrooms.
MRS. BANIC: It was a one bedroom and a living room and kitchen. The kitchen was half down below ground.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you are telling me about your apartment on Waddell Circle was a two bedroom apartment.
MRS. BANIC: One bedroom apartment and the window was there, so that the kids, they loved to watch me cook and they could get down on their knees and look through the window and they wanted George to entertain them. George played the violin and he played for his own amusement, their amusement I guess. Anyway he would get out and fiddle sort of anything for them and they just loved that and we had a little table that was off of the wall. It just folded down off of the wall and so the first chairs we bought, I still have and they are in my back room and they were some little metal chairs that we bought coming in from Knoxville one day and I wouldn’t give those chairs away for anything because that was a purchase we had to have on Waddell Circle. I am sure we bought something else. I am sure we bought a bed and other things but those chairs were something we had to eat on in the kitchen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So let’s talk little bit more about your marriage to George. Where did you guys get married?
MRS. BANIC: Well that was interesting because I had to have a Protestant marriage and a Catholic marriage marrying a boy from Pennsylvania, first of all, I went with George to Pennsylvania. We went all the way from here to Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: No interstates in those days.
MRS. BANIC: Yeah and then of course a nice girl from South Carolina didn’t go to a hotel with a man and that’s a whole new ball game, and so we drove and when we would stop and rest and George would get in the back seat and I would sleep in the front and we’d take a little nap. I remember on the Lee Highway, here we were trucks going by like this, something terrible but we did sleep a little bit and we made it up there fine. I stayed at his sister’s house who is right next door to his father’s house and of course they were different for me. I even think that George’s father who came from Yugoslavia thought I wasn’t too bad because nobody had been there to cook for him since his wife had been dead, as a matter of fact since I first met George she had died. So I cooked for him on a gas stove which I wasn’t accustom to and I did, you know, everything as best as I could and that was interesting too and finally my sister in law said after we had been there, I had been married to George a little while she said this is ridiculous she said we can all eat together but never did George’s daddy want to come and eat with us, we fixed his food, but he was from the old school and he did not want to bother any of us, and so he ate by himself, but we took food to him from then on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You and George went to meet his father and the rest of his family, where did you get married?
MRS. BANIC: Well, I got married twice, I got married here at the priest house in Jackson Square. The priest lived there at that time and they had a little chapel and they had that fixed up and it was just big enough for three or four people to get in and the priest and me in the little chapel it was a little porch on the F house and something like that but it had a little porch and they enclosed that and so that is where I got married the first time. George took me to the airport and it was on a Saturday, we had a reception over at the Ridge Rec. Hall. When I got to the airport, I took off my going away suit, I knew if I arrived in South Carolina my mother would have a fit and so she, she was okay with me when I got all fixed up and wore another suit and when I got there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was George with you?
MRS. BANIC: No, no, no, he just took me to the airport, dropped me off, stayed with me until the plane landed but I had been going back and forth home to Greenville every time I got $20 together. Now you can’t get there from here unless you go to Atlanta, Raleigh and Charlotte to get there. Some friends were here recently and they wanted to go and I said you can’t do that, they said oh, yes, they were going to Knoxville and see if they can fly some other place back to Nashville I said you can’t get to Nashville from here, forget it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well after you visited your mother and you came back to Oak Ridge, were you still working at the time?
MRS. BANIC: Oh, yes, I was still working. I went to my bosses and I asked them if I can have two weeks, I said I am getting married twice. I am getting married here in Oak Ridge and I went to Clinton to get, went to Maddy Hollinsworth who was the county court clerk, she was an older lady, I went to her house and she sat us down and said do you know what you kids, I was 23 and George was a year or so older, do you know what you are doing. Maddy Hollinsworth is something big in Clinton they think she hung the moon and she wanted be sure that we knew what we were doing because she had taken our license home with her so that we can see her after hours because we both couldn’t get there until 5 o’ clock until they left or whatever. So then we went to his home. When I went to Greenville my mother met me and we did the things that we need to, George came on Thursday and of course we headed then to Greenville, South Carolina, to get another license because I was going to get married in the Baptist church in my hometown. My mother’s brother who was a minister was going to marry us, but when I first got there on Thursday night they were having a party for me that night and George had bought me a great big orchid for our wedding in Oak Ridge. I went home and there was this orchid, my mother said, “Take that off, you can’t wear this,” she said, “I don’t want those people to know,” and so we had a huge crowd of people and I didn’t get to wear my orchid from my first marriage but I didn’t get to sleep with George until after we got married in the Baptist church and we scattered all of our friends down in Travelers Rest, which is a small town, and no place much to stay. We scattered them among my mother’s Garden Club and church friends and everybody that I lived with and all of George’s friends that were in the wedding and all that sort of thing and we had a big crowd.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you got married again and you came back to Oak Ridge, did you have children?
MRS. BANIC: No, I have no children, that was a choice we made and that was maybe a bad choice because it would be so nice now if I had children but I knew that being, I did not change my church and neither did he but we visited with each other’s church and one of my best friends now is Michael Wodds, who is in Knoxville at the Catholic church and we keep up with each other really, really well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I am going to mention some points of interest in Oak Ridge and you tell me what you remember about them. The Oak Terrace Ballroom.
MRS. BANIC: Well I knew an awful lot about the Oak Terrace because we ate there an awful lot. After square dances here at Oak Ridge, we had a big contingent who went to the Oak Terrace on Saturday nights to eat and if there had been a big dance upstairs we ate in another room that was upstairs and that was always such a great place to be. We have been to all sorts of dances there. When big name bands came to town and they had quite a few back a long time ago and we, I don’t know for some reason we always went, we both loved to dance and we belong to another dance club here in town and we always danced a lot and round dance that we did everything in those things but being there with all those big bands was just a great thing and they had a place upstairs to eat for people who were around at that time, a real nice dinner place to eat.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now we are talking about the Oak Terrace Ballroom, do you remember when they had the gate opening in 1949 to the city of Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: When the gate was open, George and I drove out there, we knew there would be a lot of people and we were pretty far away and I really couldn’t see a lot, there were a lot of people there and so we finally left and I don’t remember, we did not go to a big party afterward but I am sure there were parties in town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend the parade?
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you?
MRS. BANIC: I don’t remember where we stood, it has been a long time ago. I remember Marie McDonald and all those people who came and the ones who thought that they were going to get to see them and we knew those people and it was always talked about at work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Another place of interest was a Snow White Drive In, do you remember that?
MRS. BANIC: I am very familiar with that, we were talking about that just recently with somebody and they said you can’t remember that and I said oh sure, I remember that real well and speaking to Mr. Tunnell before I remember one time I was there and Mr. Tunnell has always been a womanizer all his life and you know he would come up and he would sit down beside me and I would say Mr. Tunnell, I am here with a lot of my friends and my husband, I got to go back from where I came from and they would be sitting and he would spent a lot of time at the Snow White Drive In, even back a long time ago but we would eat there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where it was located?
MRS. BANIC: Well it was on this side on the, see I live in a dorm right there across from Mr. Tunnell’s which was where the teachers lived, it seemed like the Snow White was across the street, I am not real sure but it is in that same vicinity.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Close to where the Hospital entrance is today.
MRS. BANIC: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Skyway Drive In theatre, did you and George attend that?
MRS. BANIC: I went there some but I don’t remember that an awful lot.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Oak Ridge Hospital?
MRS. BANIC: Well I got bee stung on the boardwalk and from Venus Road down to where I would meet my people to go to work and when something stings me they got to get me someplace in a hurry so somebody took me to the Hospital so I spent a little time there and there is where I met Dr. Hyman Rossman and that was my first encounter with him and I remember that I was in a room there at that particular time with a lady whose husband I think was principal of the high school now that is a long time to remember that and I don’t even remember exactly what the name was but yes I remember being in the Hospital which was down on the lower level from where it was, where some of the (inaudible) buildings used to be there next door and they, I can just barely remember some of that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have good care in the Hospital?
MRS. BANIC: They had good care.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the dental?
MRS. BANIC: I had a dentist here in town and I had him forever and his office was just across from the tennis court up there in Jackson Square; Dr. I know his name very well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: We will come back, did you belong to any clubs outside the home?
MRS. BANIC: There was, when I was single I really didn’t know much about and they had some of the people at the plant had some groups and stuff but those of us that worked shift work we didn’t get involved with that too much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how do you think the city has progressed over the years since you have been here?
MRS. BANIC: Well I guess they have, well if it had not been for them beginning Downtown rather than Jackson Square, Jackson Square continues to be pretty much like it has been all the time with the bank and there another bank is coming in there. We became a stock holders in the Bank of America and George had to call the man who ran the Bank of America and he said you are going to have to send my money over to Hamilton National Bank. Mr. Mason said, oh he called George, he said George what is wrong with Hamilton, Hamilton National came out of Knoxville and so that was the big bank here at the time and that was up in Jackson Square and he said, “George, what is wrong with our bank,” and George said, “Well, don’t you think when a man gets to buy and be a stock holder in the Bank of America that I need to change my money,” he said, “Yes, George, I think so.” So, he finally sent our money to the Bank of America.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So all the years you have lived in Oak Ridge, what do you like best about Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: Well I guess I was married for 53 years and you don’t live in any place that long and not like it, job or no job. But George had a very important job and he liked it so well and he was liked by so many people and I we just would never have left here. I am sure that nobody appreciated his job more and the people that worked for him. I saw a man last night he said, I have never seen any person who was as nice to the people who worked for him, I saw him at the Outback last night and he always tells me he said, George Banic was one of the nicest men I have ever seen and said he was always the same to everybody, never mean or anything to him and said that is, he said George was a real delightful man and I guess that is what we have become over the years and I have enjoyed not only my working friends who are, a lot of them are not around anymore but it has been great to be here and we have not invested in any property or anything but we enjoy the area. We have got Norris Dam and lake for entertainment and we have a little boat up there and we were there on weekends and it was, and we went there even before we got married. We did our courting on the top of the dam so we could look down and see the lights and stuff so that is one of the places where we always go, we call that our place and we are mountain people. I climbed Mount LeConte, I did everything but scale the shale and at 22 or 25 inches snow right now, you can’t even get in the parking lot so I understand today but we, there is another way now to go to South Carolina, we used to have terrible times getting across the mountains at Christmas time but we had a big heavy car other people would be in the ditch and we just went on down the mountain and I think that this is such a picturesque part of the country and all you have to do is walk out in our backyard here and look across and see the mountains behind us and know that this is really God’s world. We have got a little bit of everything. The one thing that I would like to do that I have never been able to do is I had a friend who could take us up there and he wanted to take George and me up there; he was a young boy who had a little truck and when they used to let you go in where the windmills are up on the mountain and I think that we are so close to all those and to think about the innovations in everything that has been made through the years, a lot of it, it comes from some of the things that they have had to do here are our world would not be as cosmopolitan as far as people are concerned or as intelligent to start new inventions and all that sort of thing than the people in Oak Ridge and maybe I have not done any part of that but I have witnessed it first hand and I think that we all know that and appreciate that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well it has been a pleasure interviewing you and I believe your oral history will benefit someone in the future if they are researching Oak Ridge and I thank you very much for your time.
MRS. BANIC: And thank you.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mrs. Banic’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]

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ORAL HISTORY OF EARLINE BANIC
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 31, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is October 31, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Mrs. Earline Banic, 607 West Vanderbilt Drive, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take her oral history about living in Oak Ridge. Earline, please state your full name, place of birth and date.
MRS. BANIC: Mary Earline Smith Banic, Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The date, your date of birth.
MRS. BANIC: September 3, 1924.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name?
MRS. BANIC: Doctor, D O C T O R, Doctor, his friends called him Doc, D O C, Dr. Earl Smith and he was born up in the country and had come to town to do what he knew best, blacksmithing and he had a blacksmith shop in Travelers Rest.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the date of his birth?
MRS. BANIC: July 29, 1892, in Gap Creek, South Carolina. He died, he died at 94, in Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s name.
MRS. BANIC: Mary Aileen, A I L E E N, Smith, Aileen Watson Smith.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You recall her place of birth.
MRS. BANIC: In Travelers Rest, South Carolina, April 19, 1903, and died November 4, 1980.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your father, what school history can you remember about your father?
MRS. BANIC: I really don’t know. My father was a very smart man to do what he was doing. He wrote very well, he was the treasurer for the Sunday School and so forth at my church and he took care of that very well and took care of his business very well, but I just don’t know about his education. I don’t know what grades he might have gone to because he was up in the way up in the country from there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your mother’s education?
MRS. BANIC: My mother went to school in Travelers Rest and she went to school as long as she could. Her father was the postmaster and she stayed home to take care of the telephone central system which was in their home and she did that until she married my father and therefore they never had phones there for many years afterward, because she got married and moved away and the central system was there and by the way; they took that and put it in a garage at our house and a few years ago they realized that that had absolutely rotted away and they were really sorry that they had not preserved that for posterity.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You have sisters and brothers?
MRS. BANIC: I have one brother. Carroll Watson Smith and he lives now 3 miles from our old home and that is now in the Greenwood County. He lives near Furman University. He is 81.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At South Carolina.
MRS. BANIC: Yes, and he has a degree from Clemson College. He has a master’s degree from North Carolina and he has a Ph.D. degree from Maryland University.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And did you say earlier your father was a blacksmith?
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother, did she work when she was married?
MRS. BANIC: My mother never worked until after she was married and went to work at the post office for the postmaster and she did that part time. She was paid by the postmaster himself because he wanted some more time off when it became time for them to have another assistant in the post office, and that was after the war started and my mother took the test and all the people coming home from the war were taking the test and you can imagine, my mother won and she continued in her job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now tell me about growing up did you grow up in Travelers Rest?
MRS. BANIC: Grew up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about your schooling in Travelers Rest.
MRS. BANIC: I had a very good school to attend. There was a brand new school from and it had the first grade through the 11th grade. It was all in the same building. The auditorium was in the middle and it was a very beautiful auditorium with an upstairs and we were segregated from the other end of the building and we had all teachers and I took anything that I really needed I guess to get along in this world and I had wonderful, wonderful teachers and they inspired me to, well I don’t think I needed any inspiration to go onto further things. I realize that because my family probably inspired me with all of that and I knew that somehow I would be able to go to college, and my mother that’s when she finally went to work in earnest at the post office when she was paid by the government to work there and so I knew that that’s why she was working in order to send me to college.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what type of dress code you wore when you went to school?
MRS. BANIC: Winthrop College was the South Carolina College for Women in Rock Hills, South Carolina, and there were 2,000 people at this college at that time. All were girls and all were wearing navy blue and white. We had very fine clothes to wear to all the big opportunities to hear wonderful people speak, any of the big things that were at the college we had to dress in our navy blue and white. We had just all white clothes. We had navy suits with blouses and so forth and we all looked very nice and we’re never in there in anything else when we were having big speakers and so forth at our school, but during the day and going to school and we went to school and we had buildings for all the classes. We ate there. That was different for me to be able to eat with 10 or 12 people at a table and to learn more people but we stayed together through a year’s time and we were allowed to go back and get more food if we needed it and they made the ice cream at the college. They had their own diary and they made great big things of ice cream and they cut them in big rounds and we had plenty of nice things for dessert.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you stay there full time in a dormitory?
MRS. BANIC: I stayed in a dorm there and when the war really came to a big head, we had a lot of aviation cadets there and I would wake up in the morning to singing cadets “around her neck, she wore a yellow ribbon, she wore in the spring time”, and all that sort of stuff. Any of the army songs and we heard them and they were already up and at ‘em and we were still snoozing away and I had to move from my dorm so that some of them could move into my dorm and I moved into a different one and they used a quadrangle that we had in the walkway and we can stand out and jeer at them if they had done something bad and had to walk that quadrangle where the mischievous stuff during the day; they were aviation cadets.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you date any while you were in college?
MRS. BANIC: I dated some, I dated one of these cadets and he brought down a car and we even used his car for a while as long as we could use some stamps in order to buy gasoline and I remember sitting in the board to get a new tire, his sister was coming to pick the car up and we had to go and sit in the ration board in order to get a new tire. We had very little money, my mother sent me about $2 a week and that was my spending money.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was your diploma in graduation from college, what did you major in college?
MRS. BANIC: I majored in home economics and that was the thing for girls, I really didn’t have much of a background, well I knew that I can, I needed to learn to cook and do all those things so I can get a job teaching with that easily in South Carolina and then I had a minor in chemistry so that is another thing that enabled me to look for work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you hear about Oak Ridge and how did you get here?
MRS. BANIC: A person from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, came to Winthrop College to talk to us about the opportunities here. I had been to Asheville, North Carolina, and I had been to Knoxville when I was very small, we had friends there and we came to visit them but I had never been out to Oak Ridge, but I hadn’t been that far away from home. We always had a couple of cars, maybe never a new one, but my father was so very handy that he would buy old wrecks and fix them up. I never had a license, but I did drive some around near where I live in South Carolina.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was the top job the man from Oak Ridge, offered you?
MRS. BANIC: A job as an analyst in Y-12.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you get from where you lived then to Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: I had a friend in Spartanburg and she was a music major and you know I visited with her and she had visited me and Spartanburg, South Carolina, is not too far from Greenville. Greenville is just next door and so we met in Hendersonville on the bus and we came to Oak Ridge on the bus. When we first came we had our clothes and everything and we rode the bus up here and we spent the night in Knoxville at the Farragut Hotel and we found our way to the bus terminal that was taking people to Oak Ridge and of course we had heard from them, you know, a little bit about how to get out here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year was that?
MRS. BANIC: I graduated from college in May and it was shortly after that time. In the meantime, my mother and I had been making me some navy blue things to wear along with the white blouses and so forth because Winthrop was a uniform school and everything should be those colors and so we had already fixed me a whole bunch of clothes to wear.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the year you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: 1945, right after we graduated from college.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you rode the bus from Knoxville to Oak Ridge, do you recall where you ended up in Oak Ridge, where you came?
MRS. BANIC: We rode the bus and I guess we came into the Clinton entry and…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Elza Gate.
MRS. BANIC: Elza Gate and from there we went to a place in Oak Ridge, which is still there by the way, it looks a little bit different and it was where a man just on the other side of Oak Ridge lives and he had a business there and that is where we went and stayed until we found transportation to where we were going to live and that is where we encountered people to talk to us about where we were going to live.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now that was outside…
MRS. BANIC: That was two miles from the Elza Gate but they did bring us into Mr. Tunnell building. Mr. Tunnell still owns that same building here in Oak Ridge and he is still alive and doing well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you stayed outside until you got word to come into Oak Ridge and then they brought you through the gate, do you recall them giving you a badge at that time?
MRS. BANIC: I am sure they gave us some sort of something because we had to have something to get in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you came to the building on the [Oak Ridge] Turnpike that’s known today is the Tunnell Building.
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Close to the Castle on the Hill and what transpired in that building?
MRS. BANIC: I just know that actually we moved into a dorm near there to begin with because it took some time for us to find out. They wanted to send us to another place but there was a, in fact, they did send us to a dorm which was near Jackson Square now at the time but we didn’t stay there but a very short time. There were people there. Here we were southern girls who had a regular time to go to bed sort of speak and most of the people there were away from home and carousing day and night and I said, “I can’t live here. I got to live with some other kind of people,” so they moved us into a teachers building that housed only Oak Ridge school teachers and that was all as you leave Jackson Square going away and it was down on the Turnpike actually but it was close to the building that we first went to.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the dormitory that you first lived in can you just remember what the inside look like the room?
MRS. BANIC: It was very nice but I came with a girl that was much heavier than I and we had a bunk bed, and of course, I never slept in a bunk bed but I knew that I was going to have to sleep up on the top bunk and we got along real well together and it was different to say the least. It was not like being in a school dorm all those years and we never really live close together in a dorm but we knew each other because Spartanburg was not too far away from Travelers Rest, about 32 miles and so I would visit her and so forth and so I knew something about her.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now do you recall, did you have to go down the hall to the bathroom and shower was that in the room what do you recall?
MRS. BANIC: We had to go down the hall to shower and to the bathroom. I remember that much about those dorms. They were all wooden and they were very noisy, if the people wanted to be, and some people were working different hours and that was something that was hard to get accustom to but it didn’t bother us too bad until we sort of made up our mind. I think we did move into one other place for a little while and then we found out that there were houses where we might move. These houses were some of the largest house that they had built for people coming into Oak Ridge was a what they called they had A, B, C, and this was a D house and it was on Venus Road and we got there, they had had bunk beds in there but they had changed and put only six people into the building. She and I had a room together in one of those houses and there were other girls who were college people. We had to make our way as far as we had to make plans for our food and each of us took a week at a time and we cooked for a week, not each of us but two of us, we would cook a week at a time so there were three people, actually three pairs of people cooking.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you are telling me that in this D house which is a three bedroom house that was--
MRS. BANIC: No, I said a D house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: D had three bedrooms and there were six people living in the D house.
MRS. BANIC: Yeah. But no we had regular beds when I moved into there, regular beds.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bunk beds were in the dorm you slept in.
MRS. BANIC: Yes. I am trying to think about the bathrooms. You may know more about bathrooms than I do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well they had one and some had half baths as well but do you recall was the house warm in the winter time?
MRS. BANIC: Oh yes and the government, I don’t remember any, I don’t remember any bills for heat or anything, that was all in the rent we paid.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You remember what the rent was.
MRS. BANIC: Seem like that was in the beginning, it was seem like $15 a person. That seems such a small amount now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the people bringing the coal and put in the coal in the coal bin in the house?
MRS. BANIC: No, no. I don’t recall that at all. I don’t think it was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe where you washed your clothes and how you washed your clothes in those days?
MRS. BANIC: No, that is difficult. I imagine that we didn’t, surely we didn’t have a washing machine. No way would we have a washing machine so we had to wash them I guess and they had some large sinks in the utility room and I guess that we took turns washing them and hanging them up. That is so far removed from my thinking.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about grocery shopping?
MRS. BANIC: That was the fun part because we were so close to the street across the Turnpike. Venus Road is not too far from what is now the Oak Ridge Turnpike and we didn’t have to go very far to a store and pretty soon we had friends who had cars. She got a friend right across the street and whom she married. It was a boy that lived across the street and so he would come by in the morning and leave us his car for the day and go to work with somebody else and so if we were, we were all working shift work but if he knew we were off for the day shift, he would bring the car. We not only learned Oak Ridge, we learned all about Knoxville. We can go back and forth in Knoxville. I knew Knoxville like a book and we could get our groceries and do what we had to do. Often times we had to walk over there sometimes to get something we didn’t have and it wasn’t too far and buses then were traveling around through but that was they would go too far away so we didn’t shop for groceries in a bus. We managed somehow. Somebody would have some friend or something who would take us to get groceries, if we didn’t have a car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You talked about shift work when you worked. What shifts did you work?
MRS. BANIC: We worked all three shifts and that was an interesting thing because you had to learn to sleep in the daytime and you have nobody coming in and we were all different. Two of the girls that lived in my house, they worked way down past K-25 at some place way down in there and they were all, some of them were they worked for, oh mercy, don’t know, they worked for somebody but anyway they were almost engineers. They were really well. They were damn Yankees sort of speak and they had wonderful positions and we were happy to have them because they were entertaining but then we had, it was always somebody to take the joy out of living because she didn’t want chicken and she wouldn’t even be in the house if we cooked chicken and that girl is still alive and lives in Minneapolis now and I will never forget it and many of these people are gone. Many of my friends are gone and some of them would move away far away and we would almost never see them and I only know of three. One lives in Pennsylvania and one lives in Minneapolis and one and that’s about it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were also at Y-12 is that correct? What kind of job is that? Describe that job.
MRS. BANIC: I was put into a lab, a chemical laboratory in one of the buildings in Y-12. It was right down from the gate and there we met all kinds of people, which was so different from the people that we had known but we had nice bosses and they took care of us, so to speak, and then we had gentlemen friends in there, they were some of them were from far away and some of them, most of them were far away and so we got to know a whole new group of people. Of all those lives, there’s probably not very many of them around anymore but the boss man was a little bit older and he kept up with us pretty well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You recall what your job was you did when you were in a lab?
MRS. BANIC: Yes. There were interesting things to do. We were working in the uranium processing business and sort of keeping the people who were separating things from one thing from another and we had to put some things with them and shake up through a lot of funnels and then bleed them out whatever they wanted, it would come out. We would take them out and use that and we used a lot of, we had the dark room which we had to dry some of that out and, in a way it was interesting, but you never knew exactly what you were doing. Right then I did not know what we were doing but I knew it had to do with processing some stuff to find out its impurities and so forth and then I went from one place to another building when they built a bigger place and we did some of the same things. I worked in a spectrographic lab for a long time and so therefore we were doing, you know, a different type of processing the material so by then I had found out a little bit I knew we weren’t making fly swatters that’s for sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did anyone talk about-- ?
MRS. BANIC: That’s what we were always told.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did anyone talk about their job? Did you talk about it between yourselves?
MRS. BANIC: No, but I found out on a bus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you find out on the bus?
MRS. BANIC: Somebody told me. I don’t know who it was but somebody who shouldn’t have been talking told me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall seeing around the city billboards that would say keep your mouth shut?
MRS. BANIC: Oh yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Or (inaudible) you things of that nature.
MRS. BANIC: Oh yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Reminders that you shouldn’t talk about your work.
MRS. BANIC: That you are not to talk about it, that’s right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Also do you recall seeing billboards about the savings bonds and stamps and buying bonds?
MRS. BANIC: You know I really don’t remember an awful lot of that. You know we were still trying to get to the Oak Ridge Turnpike building and there was mud and there was this and that and the other when I first came and I was just glad to be able to get around and to go down to the tennis court dances and a few of those things for little bit of outing after we learned a little bit about the city and what was going on, but I don’t remember an awful a lot. I know there was some other grocery store people, you know people who were in different sections had their own places to shop. Lot of them didn’t go to this big farmer’s market that was up on the about where the Baptist Church and all is now. It was so different then and transportation for a lot of people was nil and they just had to get around as best they could and I remember that somebody lived near us and finally we had somebody to take us to work otherwise we had to ride a bus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The farmer’s market, you’re referring to the Baptist Church that’s first Baptist Church.
MRS. BANIC: First Baptist Church of course that’s a little ways from Venus Road but there were a lot of buildings on up through there and they sold different things, the different stores so you had to go to one store to get something and then another store to get another product.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you handle the mud it was so bad?
MRS. BANIC: I don’t know. It began to get better and we just had to clean our shoes and we had boardwalks to walk on and mostly boardwalks and then by the time we could get across the street when it was muddy there was some more, they put up few more boardwalks so people could walk on the boardwalk and they were just regular plank boardwalks that they put down and you had to stand in line in all the grocery stores where you went, if you wanted some meat you stood forever and ever and they only had meat certain days and you had to know when they were coming and never could you buy any ice cream or anything from anybody that didn’t have the, where-with-all to keep it for a long time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned ration stamps where you used to live, did you have ration stamps in Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: I must have because I had some friends at home who had farms and they had a lot of and they had gasoline ration stamps. In fact we used ration stamps when we were in college. I had some friends who would come and visit me and they had a car and they had tractors and they had other things at home and they would give me some of those stamps in order for us to use in the cars that we rode in with people.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you recall how the weather was, was the winters real cold and snowy?
MRS. BANIC: Well since I came in May it was very comfortable for a good while and I remembered night time it being real cold and riding on the bus with a heater in the middle of the bus and you would get there and maybe you didn’t have a dime to put in the and they passed out a few tokens and we dropped them in, they were just, that is their business, they had to keep the buses running and if we complained why they would let us use one of the tokens that they had.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were the buses crowded?
MRS. BANIC: At times, maybe not so much at night because I guess most of the people were just single people well probably a lot of other people I just don’t remember, I just remember getting on the buses at night and going in and I remember one time at Christmas time; the first Christmas I was working and I was, I saw that I wasn’t going to be able to go to South Carolina for Christmas. I had been there since May and I thought, “what am I going to do” and so I told them at work I would like to make my way to Knoxville so that I can get a bus to go home and I did just that, I was able to do that and I probably, I was very young so the world was my oyster and I figured that somebody was going to help me along and I did get to go to South Carolina for Christmas and they let me go at work and I asked the bosses if can be absent for a day or two and they said yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall were there a lot of men at Oak Ridge at that time?
MRS. BANIC: Well, yes, I guess, I remember going to church and the church I attended was up on top of the hill, it was up where the Jefferson Junior High School became and after maybe that was built we had been living in a dorm, we would walk up there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Chapel on the Hill?
MRS. BANIC: No, not the Chapel on the Hill, this is up above the football, the top of the hill, the football field is here now and there was a big building up there and I think that was a school building, that was Jefferson Junior High School back at that time; it was a junior high school, maybe it was the high school but, yes, it was the high school because I remember that Clinton came to play basketball there once but I wouldn’t go up there and we had come back to the rec. hall on the way back to our dorm when we lived down there. That was after but even before we moved to Venus Road I remember all that earlier, now that I remember.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You spoke about dances, where did they hold the dances?
MRS. BANIC: In the tennis court, in the summer time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Town Site area?
MRS. BANIC: In the Town Site area and down at Jefferson any place where, I remember so well that going to the tennis court dances.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well did they have a lot of men to dance with?
MRS. BANIC: They must have, we didn’t dance with each other.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what type of music they played?
MRS. BANIC: Well, I don’t remember any of the music from then but it was music that we had heard maybe at home or on the radio or something beforehand and when I was in college of course before that I knew a lot of the songs because we had dances every Saturday night. Sometimes we didn’t have anybody much to dance with but we only had to pay 10 cents to go to a movie and then we go onto wherever they were having the dance that night.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they charge for dances on the tennis court?
MRS. BANIC: You know I don’t recall. I don’t recall whether they did or not.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And was that live music or was it piped in music?
MRS. BANIC: I am sure it was piped in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Big band songs.
MRS. BANIC: They didn’t have any bands back then not around that I heard.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tommy Dorsey and big bands like that.
MRS. BANIC: All yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What other things did you do for fun when you had the time to do those things?
MRS. BANIC: Well when the war broke out I have been asked many times where were you when everybody else was celebrating, we went to the swimming pool. We didn’t want to get into all the mess. There was a lot of young people here just loads of young people and I remember that we went to the swimming pool. It was fairly warm and we enjoyed that and we gave up all the other stuff just to be out of the way of people because people were so numerous.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about movies? Did you attend the movie theatre?
MRS. BANIC: Yes. There was one up where in the Jackson, one movie house in Jackson Square that I remember and later there was one in Grove Center.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Also did you go bowling or skating?
MRS. BANIC: Well we went over and watched. I was never a skater and I went over to later on went over to Jefferson and watched them skate once in a while and bowling in Grove Center maybe once in a while and by that time there was a lot of the big swimming pool was built. I don’t remember what year but --
MR. HUNNICUTT: You refer to the skating in Jefferson at the Jefferson shopping area is that on the west end of town?
MRS. BANIC: I don’t remember. I don’t remember any at Jefferson. It might have been but I don’t remember that. We were interested in going mainly to, they had some dances there at the Rec Hall and we would go in there and.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At Jefferson.
MRS. BANIC: Jefferson and that is a government building now like you are going up to the old Chapel on the Hill and it’s right on the, it was right on the corner.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was the library underneath the Rec Hall?
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s on Kentucky Avenue.
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the friends that you made in the neighborhood. Did you make many friends in the neighborhood when you lived on Venus Road?
MRS. BANIC: Well we lived among a lot of young people. There were quite a few boys next door to us and I do know one of those boys that is still alive and is here now and there was a house full of girls across the street and then a house full of boys just to the left of us and we knew our neighbors besides and we lived in that house on Venus Road for and I was the 13th one to get married out of that house. There were some of the girls that already married when I got into the house. They married right away before I got there in June of, in May of ‘45 and those people were interesting people because they were from all over the country and when we got a chance with friends we would go to Knoxville and go to dinner at some of the country clubs with some of our friends and that sort of thing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you find they were from all different parts of the United States?
MRS. BANIC: Yes, yeah every place, every place and we did have a few of the girls got married and finally when the Chapel on the Hill was built and one of the girls in our house got married there and then another one and we helped with all the refreshments for the parties and so forth and that was interesting. I met my husband in 1946 and that was a different time for me because here I was a little Southern Baptist from South Carolina and I met a Catholic boy from Pennsylvania. The first boy in Oak Ridge, the first person in Oak Ridge that had a brand new car, he had his name on the list in Pennsylvania and this is the first car that came and it was supposed to be his sister’s car but she didn’t want a car that they sent which was a two tone green fleet line Chevrolet and when he brought a bunch of boys back to his house they had been out. They said how would you like to see a George’s new car, well, my eyes and ears pricked up because I had been riding to Knoxville on a big old bus with the big heater in the middle and having to change buses in Knoxville a couple of times to go where we wanted to eat and back to the movie and this, that and the other and now I had somebody that I could do this all in one car. What a big thing that was but then that was the problem of what is a little girl going to marry, how you are going to explain it to your parents that you met somebody you might marry. I said my mother will never accept him, but you know very a persuasive girl told her that you know this is it, you know accept me and him or not and so I remember when she was in her dying bed, she was hoping that George would come that day and help her because she was very ill and he could pick her up and move her around and my father was getting old at that time and he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t pick her up and I had to tug her around as best as I could and she loved George and even as a matter of fact when Christmas Eve would come he talked them all into going to midnight mass in Greenville once and I about fainted, but they all went.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s back up a minute to 1945 when the news came out they dropped the bomb Japan where were you?
MRS. BANIC: I was in the lab and that’s the first that I knew about it at all and it was very exciting time for us because by then we realized that we had been doing something for the war effort and maybe a lot of people didn’t really know, all of the people in the lab would work so hard to do what they asked us to do and the first thing I knew they allowed somebody to go out and get some coffee and donuts, so we celebrated. We celebrated the beginning of the war and never, never had we had anything to eat in the lab before, never and that was a fun time for us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What shift were you working when you heard the news?
MRS. BANIC: That was, I think that was the afternoon shift when we found out.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you left work and got back to the city was people still celebrating?
MRS. BANIC: I think so.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall, did you have a telephone when you lived in the D house?
MRS. BANIC: What was a telephone? I had a hard time getting a date with my friend because the man across the street asked me, he said “Earline, George said that he would like to take you out and would you go,” and I said, “Oh yes, I think so too,” and he said, “Well, he can’t come to see you”, and I worked shift and he worked straight days so it was quite a while. Finally he said he can’t get here when you are either working or whatever and it’s too late at night and you are already in bed. “Will you go if I take one of the girls in the house and you go with George.” I said, “Yeah, I guess that will be okay.” So I agreed to go with him for the first time then and as a matter of fact this person married the girl in my house and he is the one that used to come and leave his car with us every day to go shopping in Knoxville and he has just died here in town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall milk deliveries to the houses?
MRS. BANIC: Milk deliveries?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. BANIC: You know that I am sure that must have been but I don’t remember that at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about door to door salesmen?
MRS. BANIC: I never saw any.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about other place? Where did you live other than on Venus Road?
MRS. BANIC: Well by then I was married and I lived in a little apartment up on Waddell Circle and we had a car and I don’t think that that was really important and I rode to work with some people because George had to have the car to get there when he did and I walked down from my house down to catch a bus at, I can’t remember what the name of the street is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the apartment on Waddell Circle, any bedrooms.
MRS. BANIC: It was a one bedroom and a living room and kitchen. The kitchen was half down below ground.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you are telling me about your apartment on Waddell Circle was a two bedroom apartment.
MRS. BANIC: One bedroom apartment and the window was there, so that the kids, they loved to watch me cook and they could get down on their knees and look through the window and they wanted George to entertain them. George played the violin and he played for his own amusement, their amusement I guess. Anyway he would get out and fiddle sort of anything for them and they just loved that and we had a little table that was off of the wall. It just folded down off of the wall and so the first chairs we bought, I still have and they are in my back room and they were some little metal chairs that we bought coming in from Knoxville one day and I wouldn’t give those chairs away for anything because that was a purchase we had to have on Waddell Circle. I am sure we bought something else. I am sure we bought a bed and other things but those chairs were something we had to eat on in the kitchen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So let’s talk little bit more about your marriage to George. Where did you guys get married?
MRS. BANIC: Well that was interesting because I had to have a Protestant marriage and a Catholic marriage marrying a boy from Pennsylvania, first of all, I went with George to Pennsylvania. We went all the way from here to Pennsylvania.
MR. HUNNICUTT: No interstates in those days.
MRS. BANIC: Yeah and then of course a nice girl from South Carolina didn’t go to a hotel with a man and that’s a whole new ball game, and so we drove and when we would stop and rest and George would get in the back seat and I would sleep in the front and we’d take a little nap. I remember on the Lee Highway, here we were trucks going by like this, something terrible but we did sleep a little bit and we made it up there fine. I stayed at his sister’s house who is right next door to his father’s house and of course they were different for me. I even think that George’s father who came from Yugoslavia thought I wasn’t too bad because nobody had been there to cook for him since his wife had been dead, as a matter of fact since I first met George she had died. So I cooked for him on a gas stove which I wasn’t accustom to and I did, you know, everything as best as I could and that was interesting too and finally my sister in law said after we had been there, I had been married to George a little while she said this is ridiculous she said we can all eat together but never did George’s daddy want to come and eat with us, we fixed his food, but he was from the old school and he did not want to bother any of us, and so he ate by himself, but we took food to him from then on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You and George went to meet his father and the rest of his family, where did you get married?
MRS. BANIC: Well, I got married twice, I got married here at the priest house in Jackson Square. The priest lived there at that time and they had a little chapel and they had that fixed up and it was just big enough for three or four people to get in and the priest and me in the little chapel it was a little porch on the F house and something like that but it had a little porch and they enclosed that and so that is where I got married the first time. George took me to the airport and it was on a Saturday, we had a reception over at the Ridge Rec. Hall. When I got to the airport, I took off my going away suit, I knew if I arrived in South Carolina my mother would have a fit and so she, she was okay with me when I got all fixed up and wore another suit and when I got there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was George with you?
MRS. BANIC: No, no, no, he just took me to the airport, dropped me off, stayed with me until the plane landed but I had been going back and forth home to Greenville every time I got $20 together. Now you can’t get there from here unless you go to Atlanta, Raleigh and Charlotte to get there. Some friends were here recently and they wanted to go and I said you can’t do that, they said oh, yes, they were going to Knoxville and see if they can fly some other place back to Nashville I said you can’t get to Nashville from here, forget it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well after you visited your mother and you came back to Oak Ridge, were you still working at the time?
MRS. BANIC: Oh, yes, I was still working. I went to my bosses and I asked them if I can have two weeks, I said I am getting married twice. I am getting married here in Oak Ridge and I went to Clinton to get, went to Maddy Hollinsworth who was the county court clerk, she was an older lady, I went to her house and she sat us down and said do you know what you kids, I was 23 and George was a year or so older, do you know what you are doing. Maddy Hollinsworth is something big in Clinton they think she hung the moon and she wanted be sure that we knew what we were doing because she had taken our license home with her so that we can see her after hours because we both couldn’t get there until 5 o’ clock until they left or whatever. So then we went to his home. When I went to Greenville my mother met me and we did the things that we need to, George came on Thursday and of course we headed then to Greenville, South Carolina, to get another license because I was going to get married in the Baptist church in my hometown. My mother’s brother who was a minister was going to marry us, but when I first got there on Thursday night they were having a party for me that night and George had bought me a great big orchid for our wedding in Oak Ridge. I went home and there was this orchid, my mother said, “Take that off, you can’t wear this,” she said, “I don’t want those people to know,” and so we had a huge crowd of people and I didn’t get to wear my orchid from my first marriage but I didn’t get to sleep with George until after we got married in the Baptist church and we scattered all of our friends down in Travelers Rest, which is a small town, and no place much to stay. We scattered them among my mother’s Garden Club and church friends and everybody that I lived with and all of George’s friends that were in the wedding and all that sort of thing and we had a big crowd.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you got married again and you came back to Oak Ridge, did you have children?
MRS. BANIC: No, I have no children, that was a choice we made and that was maybe a bad choice because it would be so nice now if I had children but I knew that being, I did not change my church and neither did he but we visited with each other’s church and one of my best friends now is Michael Wodds, who is in Knoxville at the Catholic church and we keep up with each other really, really well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I am going to mention some points of interest in Oak Ridge and you tell me what you remember about them. The Oak Terrace Ballroom.
MRS. BANIC: Well I knew an awful lot about the Oak Terrace because we ate there an awful lot. After square dances here at Oak Ridge, we had a big contingent who went to the Oak Terrace on Saturday nights to eat and if there had been a big dance upstairs we ate in another room that was upstairs and that was always such a great place to be. We have been to all sorts of dances there. When big name bands came to town and they had quite a few back a long time ago and we, I don’t know for some reason we always went, we both loved to dance and we belong to another dance club here in town and we always danced a lot and round dance that we did everything in those things but being there with all those big bands was just a great thing and they had a place upstairs to eat for people who were around at that time, a real nice dinner place to eat.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now we are talking about the Oak Terrace Ballroom, do you remember when they had the gate opening in 1949 to the city of Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: When the gate was open, George and I drove out there, we knew there would be a lot of people and we were pretty far away and I really couldn’t see a lot, there were a lot of people there and so we finally left and I don’t remember, we did not go to a big party afterward but I am sure there were parties in town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend the parade?
MRS. BANIC: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you?
MRS. BANIC: I don’t remember where we stood, it has been a long time ago. I remember Marie McDonald and all those people who came and the ones who thought that they were going to get to see them and we knew those people and it was always talked about at work.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Another place of interest was a Snow White Drive In, do you remember that?
MRS. BANIC: I am very familiar with that, we were talking about that just recently with somebody and they said you can’t remember that and I said oh sure, I remember that real well and speaking to Mr. Tunnell before I remember one time I was there and Mr. Tunnell has always been a womanizer all his life and you know he would come up and he would sit down beside me and I would say Mr. Tunnell, I am here with a lot of my friends and my husband, I got to go back from where I came from and they would be sitting and he would spent a lot of time at the Snow White Drive In, even back a long time ago but we would eat there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where it was located?
MRS. BANIC: Well it was on this side on the, see I live in a dorm right there across from Mr. Tunnell’s which was where the teachers lived, it seemed like the Snow White was across the street, I am not real sure but it is in that same vicinity.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Close to where the Hospital entrance is today.
MRS. BANIC: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Skyway Drive In theatre, did you and George attend that?
MRS. BANIC: I went there some but I don’t remember that an awful lot.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Oak Ridge Hospital?
MRS. BANIC: Well I got bee stung on the boardwalk and from Venus Road down to where I would meet my people to go to work and when something stings me they got to get me someplace in a hurry so somebody took me to the Hospital so I spent a little time there and there is where I met Dr. Hyman Rossman and that was my first encounter with him and I remember that I was in a room there at that particular time with a lady whose husband I think was principal of the high school now that is a long time to remember that and I don’t even remember exactly what the name was but yes I remember being in the Hospital which was down on the lower level from where it was, where some of the (inaudible) buildings used to be there next door and they, I can just barely remember some of that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have good care in the Hospital?
MRS. BANIC: They had good care.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the dental?
MRS. BANIC: I had a dentist here in town and I had him forever and his office was just across from the tennis court up there in Jackson Square; Dr. I know his name very well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: We will come back, did you belong to any clubs outside the home?
MRS. BANIC: There was, when I was single I really didn’t know much about and they had some of the people at the plant had some groups and stuff but those of us that worked shift work we didn’t get involved with that too much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how do you think the city has progressed over the years since you have been here?
MRS. BANIC: Well I guess they have, well if it had not been for them beginning Downtown rather than Jackson Square, Jackson Square continues to be pretty much like it has been all the time with the bank and there another bank is coming in there. We became a stock holders in the Bank of America and George had to call the man who ran the Bank of America and he said you are going to have to send my money over to Hamilton National Bank. Mr. Mason said, oh he called George, he said George what is wrong with Hamilton, Hamilton National came out of Knoxville and so that was the big bank here at the time and that was up in Jackson Square and he said, “George, what is wrong with our bank,” and George said, “Well, don’t you think when a man gets to buy and be a stock holder in the Bank of America that I need to change my money,” he said, “Yes, George, I think so.” So, he finally sent our money to the Bank of America.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So all the years you have lived in Oak Ridge, what do you like best about Oak Ridge?
MRS. BANIC: Well I guess I was married for 53 years and you don’t live in any place that long and not like it, job or no job. But George had a very important job and he liked it so well and he was liked by so many people and I we just would never have left here. I am sure that nobody appreciated his job more and the people that worked for him. I saw a man last night he said, I have never seen any person who was as nice to the people who worked for him, I saw him at the Outback last night and he always tells me he said, George Banic was one of the nicest men I have ever seen and said he was always the same to everybody, never mean or anything to him and said that is, he said George was a real delightful man and I guess that is what we have become over the years and I have enjoyed not only my working friends who are, a lot of them are not around anymore but it has been great to be here and we have not invested in any property or anything but we enjoy the area. We have got Norris Dam and lake for entertainment and we have a little boat up there and we were there on weekends and it was, and we went there even before we got married. We did our courting on the top of the dam so we could look down and see the lights and stuff so that is one of the places where we always go, we call that our place and we are mountain people. I climbed Mount LeConte, I did everything but scale the shale and at 22 or 25 inches snow right now, you can’t even get in the parking lot so I understand today but we, there is another way now to go to South Carolina, we used to have terrible times getting across the mountains at Christmas time but we had a big heavy car other people would be in the ditch and we just went on down the mountain and I think that this is such a picturesque part of the country and all you have to do is walk out in our backyard here and look across and see the mountains behind us and know that this is really God’s world. We have got a little bit of everything. The one thing that I would like to do that I have never been able to do is I had a friend who could take us up there and he wanted to take George and me up there; he was a young boy who had a little truck and when they used to let you go in where the windmills are up on the mountain and I think that we are so close to all those and to think about the innovations in everything that has been made through the years, a lot of it, it comes from some of the things that they have had to do here are our world would not be as cosmopolitan as far as people are concerned or as intelligent to start new inventions and all that sort of thing than the people in Oak Ridge and maybe I have not done any part of that but I have witnessed it first hand and I think that we all know that and appreciate that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well it has been a pleasure interviewing you and I believe your oral history will benefit someone in the future if they are researching Oak Ridge and I thank you very much for your time.
MRS. BANIC: And thank you.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mrs. Banic’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]